illness

A blogger risks his career, everything he’s worked his whole life for, when he begins to exploit his cat for new material.

His beautiful, luxurious and intellectually superior cat.

What I’m saying is, posting shit like that places me squarely in the borderlands of the crazy-old-loner-guy from the creepy house down the street. Or from Apartment 16F, for you high-density urbanites reading. People, as a general rule, don’t like crazy-old-loner-guy. And that makes me sad. I’ve always known that one day I would become that guy. But I never dreamed it would happen before August.

You don’t notice how quickly it ages you to post cat pictures and videos, until it’s too late. Suddenly, people stop visiting your blog. I got an email from my mom asking me how I was, and if I could somehow prevent Basement Life from reaching her computer.

The stats give testimony to the fact that my blog has become disconnected from its core audiences. According to WordPress analytics, those would be “depressed insomniacs” and “cats/infants messing around with the keyboard”.

In the past month alone, my daily average page-views total has plummeted a shocking 50 percent, from three to 1.5 now. Which is about the same time I switched to the 24×7 cat programming format, when I started posting shit like this:

The problem, as you can see, extends well into the physical universe. The video was shot on the afternoon of Waitangi Day, a holiday in honor of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between Queen Victoria and many Iwis. It was the beginning of New Zealand. It was an important time for national reflection. And I used my time off work to shoot moronic video of my cat.

The shame. It piles up on me like so many dust bunnies regurgitated by your cat. Not only had the neighbors caught me surveilling Vince on video—a fate worse than being spotted by strangers with Vince on a lead—but then I gotta go post the video to YouTube, add tags, give it a title, and push the link on Twitter and Facebook. What kind of sick, pathetic person would go and do such a thing? The old creepy guy in apartment 16F, that’s whom. Think Gary Busey.

I have several good excuses for what I will call my ‘changing’. In the first place, it’s not my fault. I’m under the influence of a creature who has a far higher brain-to-body mass ratio than Jacquie’s and mine put together. Obviously, having more brain weight available for complex cognitive tasks always implies telepathic influence and control of others. Vince is fucking with our heads, man. Making us do things. Not any kind of inappropriate licking, mind you, just little things like making us open doors, feed him, and stabourselves in the eye with a fork while we’re trying to finish our dinner in peace. That sort of thing.

But I think I’ve turned into Gary Busey for a much more obvious reason. He’s so cute, I don’t mind damaging my sensitive tissue and organs with cutlery. Let alone, to post things like this next one.

To tell you the truth, I wanted to write something else today. About how I’d been in bed for most of the last six days because of an infection in my groin. But as much as I desire to be pitied, don’t feel bad for me because I’ve been sick. Feel bad for me because I’ve turned into an even bigger dork than you could ever imagine.